THE CONCEALMENT OF ART
IN the previous chapter the beginner was told to work, by preference, from character to plot. If you make your plot first, you decide what the characters will do before you know whether they are likely to do it or not, and you will probably be found out by the reader. The author must never be found out. The art which is not concealed is not art. For a similar reason it is better to get the effect of a character from dialogue rather than from description. Suppose, for instance, that you wish to depict a man who has a certain shade of commonness. The exact shade is definite in your own mind, but you find it difficult to describe it in a way that is at once lucid and interesting. By the words you put into that character's mouth you can get that shade rendered so precisely that your readers cannot miss it, and most of them will not quite know how the impression has been given them. But I shall return to the important subject of dialogue in a following chapter. It will be constantly necessary in your story, and for the purposes of your story, to give information to your reader, but you should never let him catch you at it. Let us suppose that you are writing a story in one of the last chapters of which the villain throws a woman down a well at the end of a garden. How are you to inform the reader that there is a well at the end of the garden ? Perhaps the crudest and clumsiest way would be to wait until the chapter in which the tragedy occurs, and then to write, At the end of the garden there was a picturesque old well. ' This is a method which will not take in a baby. It stamps the whole story as being made-up, and clumsily made-up. It should be a rule with you that all information required by the reader for an occasion in the story must be given before the occasion arrives. It would perhaps be a little less clumsy to insert your sentence about the well in your very first chapter, but even this will not take in the experienced reader. Hello, ' he would say to himself, this well is not here for the purposes of its health. Somebody will be going down it presently. ' It is not really necessary to mention that well at all. If you refer to the taste of iron in the drinking-water from the rusty chains, or if you depict an old man coming up the garden to the house with the pails of water hanging from a yoke, your reader will know that there is a well at the end of the garden, and he will not know how he knows it. There are, of course, other ways by which the same information might be given. Though it is risky to write that there was a picturesque old well at the end of the garden, it will be fairly safe to refer to the scent of the syringa bushes growing by the well at the end of the garden. The reader will think you are worrying about those syringa bushes, and his suspicions will not be aroused. But, when the time comes for the tragedy, he will have all the information he wants. Give then your information indirectly whenever it is possible. Let us suppose that there is a fact called B which it is necessary for your reader to know. Let us suppose, further, that this information could be naturally deduced from another fact called A. In that case do not tell your reader B. Tell him A, and let him find out B for himself. For instance, we will say that you wish your heroine to have that attractive and rather indefinable quality which is known as charm. It is worse than useless to write that she had great charm, and to leave it at that. But if you can make her say the things that a charming woman would say, and if you can give the effect she makes on the other characters as the effect which a charming woman would make, your reader will be convinced. He will not be saying to himself that he knows the heroine has charm merely because the author has told him so, but he will have formed in his own mind the idea of a charming woman, without knowing precisely how he has got it. This concealment of art is particularly necessary in relating pathetic incidents. The very first essential for writing pathos is a sense of humor. After all, a sense of humor is much the same thing as a sense of proportion. It will save you here from extravagance and sentimentality, two things which very commonly ruin a pathetic scene ; and when a pathetic scene has blundered over the edge it becomes horribly funny. Your very motive must be concealed. Once the reader believes that you are trying to make him cry, it is definitely certain that you will get no tears. All comments from yourself should be barred in the pathetic scene. All luxuriance of adjectives should be pruned. The impression of reality must be very vivid. There is nothing pathetic in the woes of dummies ; one would be more sorry for a real child's trouble over a broken toy. The pathos must come from facts that look as if they must have happened ; from characters who really live ; and from the words which they must inevitably have used. In no scene in your book will severe restraint be more absolutely necessary than in the pathetic scenes. If you can, by your subtlety and by the concealment of your art, lead your reader to believe that you do not appreciate the pathos of the scene half as much as he does, you have practically won the game. A reader is, as a rule, pretty quick to detect with which characters the author's sympathies lie. A knowledge of this will enable you to play with him a little. Suppose that you have in your story a question of innocence or guilt, it is easy enough by infinitesimal touches to give the impression that you are not in sympathy with a certain character. Your reader will notice these little touches. He will read in them your clumsy failure to hide your dislike of a bad man. Then you establish the complete innocence of that character. I have given a crude instance from a simple and common sort of detective story, but the same thing can also be used with more subtlety. One could employ it with effect in a story which dealt with development of character—where under certain circumstances or influences a character changes from good to bad, or from bad to good. It prevents your reader from seeing what is coming, and in this way it holds the interest. category:Writing techniques